Meet the Teen Girl Scientists Who Are Going to Change the World

Prepare to be stunned by the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair's biggest stars.

Kalyani Ramadurgam was one of the standout competitors in this year's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.Photo courtesy of ISEF

State-of-the-art facial recognition software, bionic body parts for athletes, eco-friendly building materials that save lives: Is this cutting-edge technology developed in a corporate research lab (or by a top-secret government agency)? Nope, these advancements were dreamed up by three incredibly impressive teen girls.

So let's meet the high schoolers who made some major waves at last week's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, shall we? ISEF is affectionately referred to as the Olympics of science fairs since it's the largest science competition on the planet, and this trio presented their final projects (though "project" seems like way too modest of a word) along with 1,697 other brilliant minds from more than 70 countries.

First there's 15-year-old SoCal native Kalyani Ramadurgam, who designed a computer program that can recognize faces looking away from the camera. Then there's 16-year-old MacKenzie Grubb, a junior from Florida who invented a mechanical knee that helps soccer players reduce injury risk. And finally, there's 15-year-old West Virginian Miriam Demasi, who created an affordable and environmentally-sound construction material that also happens to be the perfect foundation for use in earthquake-prone regions.

The road to ISEF was paved with a whole lot of hard work and a bit of inspiration. MacKenzie, an avid soccer player, was motivated by her own injury and subsequent knee reconstruction surgery. "It took about two months to actually build the model," she explains of the apparatus that shows the strain on the tendon caused by kicks taken at different positions on the field. "Thinking about how to create a human knee out of wood, hinges, and springs wasn't an easy task. In one night, I took six trips to Ace Hardware because my knee didn't turn out proportionally!"

Kalyani was deeply affected by the Boston Marathon bombings and the difficulty authorities had in identifying the suspects using blurry, imprecise security video footage. She learned that current software doesn't recognize faces unless they're looking at the camera (and are also perfectly lit and recorded via high-resolution), so she created an alternative. "Unlike traditional methods, which only look at the relationships between facial ratios, I combined information from both pixel patterns in the pictures and from independent facial features," she succinctly explains. Her big-deal discovery won the third-place grand prize in the computer science category at ISEF.

Environmentalist Miriam actually started out delving into a different project (making windmills to purify water in developing countries) before deciding to design building materials. It took her six months to perfect, but her hard work paid off: She scored the EPA-sponsored Patrick Hurd Sustainability Award at ISEF, which involves a trip to the EPA's National Sustainable Design Expo and some pretty major scholarships.

Yeah, these girls totally rule—not to mention they represent the new wave of women in the male-dominated worlds of science and engineering. "It's different being a female because we have to work harder to get our ideas heard," MacKenzie says. "I think especially in my sports medicine and orthopedic fields of study, women are seen as weak or quiet, but being quiet doesn't mean incompetent. In fact, being a woman in science shows just how strong we can be."

Miriam agrees: "Sometimes it feels like there are stereotypes about what fields women should go into—and engineering usually isn't one of them—but if that's your passion, then you have to go for it."

And for those who do go for it, there's a close-knit community of female scientists waiting, especially at ISEF. "We all have a deep appreciation for everyone's work and the challenges some had to overcome," Miriam says.

"The support of my female peers is outstanding. We stick together just like girls should," MacKenzie adds. "A lot of older women came up to me at the competition, too. One even said, 'I hope my granddaughters grow up to be as amazing and passionate as you are, because it's people like you who will change the world.'"